


Practical killer - The basement

by ElnaK



Series: Books of Sacrifices [19]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Gen, Killers for Hire, Memory Loss, Murder, Repressed Memories, Season/Series 01, Serial Killers, killer!John Reese, mentions of other Jim Caviezel movies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-16 22:07:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11261967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElnaK/pseuds/ElnaK
Summary: It happened that he was particularly skilled at killing people.He supposed he could make the best of it, couldn't he?





	Practical killer - The basement

**Author's Note:**

> Well...  
> I don't know.
> 
> I might write more of it, not like a completely continuous story, but several one-shots? Maybe?

The blood gushed out of the wound without so much as a warning – not that it had been unexpected, but wow! That guy must have had a hell of a blood pressure... or he's right out of a Tarantino movie – and hit John right in the face.

Eyes screwed shut – blood in the eyes was never pleasant, and he had been waiting for it – John wiped off the offending crimson liquid with the towel he had put on the chair's back earlier on.

He'd have to wash his face before leaving.

Then again, he had all the time in the world to do whatever was needed before leaving, and cleaning himself up entirely had been on the schedule from the very beginning. He didn't own the freaking place just for pleasure, you know – paid cash, obviously.

Though, in a way, you could say he did own the place for pleasure. He used the reconditioned basement only when he had someone to kill and to make the body disappear afterwards, and really, such activities were pleasant enough. Not something he'd do an a 24/7 basis, but once in a while, it did feel good.

And, more than that, it felt useful. John wasn't absolutely certain he'd find what he wanted by doing this, but for now it was the only thing that even marginally called a reaction in his addled memory.

Well. Murdering assholes did the trick, but police uniforms did too. But he doubted he had been a police officer – for very long, at least – if he was this comfortable with killing people and knew so much about how to dissolve a body with caustic soda. Simple logic, really.

Perhaps he only had a uniform kink. At this point, he wouldn't really be surprised.

He might hire an uniformed stripper sometimes soon to see if it got him turned on.

The blood was flowing slower now into the drain, and John nodded thoughtfully. This guy was done for, now – he did seem to have experience with slashing a throat open; then again, he had found out he was skilled in about every possible way to kill someone, slowly or not, from firearms to poisons and barehanded techniques.

John turned to look at the person on the second rack, bloody knife still in hand, but not yet about to use it again. He was amused enough by the sight of her eyes, wide and frightened.

“Funny, isn't it?”

The woman's eyes turned around to her bodyguard, throat slit open two feet away from her, and looked so terribly terrified and maybe a bit about to throw up, that John couldn't help but to continue on – he didn't particularly need to gloat or to start a villainous monologue, but she deserved it.

“No? Well, for your information, Miss January, this is what you were about to hire me to do. Not on your bodyguard, I'm sure, but nonetheless. You came to me, you asked me to kill a man and his entire family because they stood in the way of your business, and now you think I'm a monster?”

The woman – not Miss January, of course, but it wasn't as if she would have given him her true name had he pointed out the obvious – tried to say something, but the gag kept any well-formed word from passing her lips. Better that way. John didn't want to hear her excuses, or her counter-offer, or insults about how he had more than a few screws loose. He knew that already.

He wasn't in it for the money. While he appreciated the income of being a killer for hire, he didn't have many needs. He took a job only if he saw it fit, and sometimes... Well, sometimes people like Miss January came to him, self-entitled and entirely obnoxious, and John decided they'd be his victims instead. The bodyguard wasn't exactly a saint either – former military, mercenary until not so long ago, had stopped being an assassin because of a leg injury, and was now Miss January's head of security. John always checked who his victims were before starting anything.

He might be a psychopath – or whatever else his problem was called – but he didn't like hurting undeserving people. If he was hired to take out someone just as ruthless as his employer, it was alright. If someone normal came in with a revenge against their daughter's killer, for example, he took the job too, even when it didn't pay a lot.

John wasn't pretending to be a better man because of his choice of victims; he just didn't see the point, when they were perfectly deserving people, to focus his efforts on innocent civilians – he also vaguely rememberd a time when he had had a huge hero complex, but he never spoke of that.

John put down the knife for a time, and just sat down in the chair, eyes on Miss January – hers were on him too, and he doubted she'd look anywhere else for the next minutes, the last of her life.

She didn't look like someone who'd hire a professional killer like him to end an innocent family, but what do you know? People were rarely what they looked like. John, for example, spent most of his time bartending in Brooklyn; he had made a number of almost-friends there, who knew he could send the next drunken asshole through a window without even breaking a sweat, but would never have imagined him as a killer for hire – or a serial killer; John wasn't completely sure which one of the two he was at that point.

He didn't display the tell-tale signs of a serial killer, he guessed, but at the same time he was quite diligent with killing people even without a job. When no one came to see him with a job, when no rich asshole tried to have him murder innocents, and when no one tried to kill him for too long, he walked through the streets and waited for an opportunity: a member of the local mob with blood on their hands, a drug dealer who wasn't afraid to kill a rival, a rapist he caught red-handed, once...

It wasn't that he needed to kill, no, but since his unfortunate dipping accident in the East River, and the subsequent drowing incident that had left him mostly ignorant of who he even was to begin with – he didn't even remember why he had tried to kill himself, wasn't that glorious? – killing seemed to be the only way to get some flashes of memory. Not much, and not anything that made a lot of sense – time in the military, battlefields, discreet suits, wounds, uniforms of several kinds, time at a desk, assassinations, jail, blood on his hands, two women at two different times, several funerals, the video of one of the women's wedding, a deserted city with only dead people inside, “Frank”, being called too many names for it not to be suspicious, jails, oaths, a man with two broken legs whining pitifully but undeserving of any pity... And, more than anything, a lot of pain – physical, emotional – bottled down like it didn't even exist. Or rather, like it didn't even matter.

His feelings were irrelevant.

Perhaps he had PTSD, and was blocking out everything that had made him like that – if it was the case, then his whole life had been a large bleeding open wound.

“I don't particularly care how you die, Miss, so I'd let you the choice, if I didn't know you'd ask for something quick and without pain. Which, I must say, I can deliver. That's what I'd have done if I had taken your job offer, by the way. Except I didn't, because I don't assassinate innocent people if I can help it, and you don't deserve a fast, plain death.”

He was still considering, as it was, how exactly he was going to make her pay for her arrogance.

John didn't particularly like making people suffer – somewhere deep inside, he even thought he might not like it at all – but the longer it took, the more he remembered. And, well, if taking his time was supposed to make him uncomfortable, if being cruel allowed him to remember... Perhaps, if he went too far too many times, his inner, top-secret-can't-remember-why?-please-come-back self would feel the need to come out again. Perhaps the traumatized personality inside him, who had all but closed the door with that dip in the East River, wouldn't be able to ignore what he was doing anymore.

Really, John only wanted to be himself again, and if that meant he had to murder a few people to get there... Well, there was a reason he always chose criminals.

There was a reason, too, why he was being careful about it. If he ever got back to who he was supposed to be, he didn't want to have the police after his ass for some unfortunate events like a body found with his fingerprints on it. Especially not as the NYPD already had his fingerprints.

A detective Carter had been with him to the hospital after his botched suicide attempt – someone had pulled him out before he could die properly. When she had realized he didn't even know who he was supposed to be, she had taken his fingerprints and told him she'd come back to tell him whether or not she found anything about him – like, say, if he had already had minor problems with the police, which was possible considering he was probably a bum.

Strangely enough John had felt it wasn't a good idea to stick around and wait for her to come back.

Turned out he had been right. Apparently he had several warrants on his head, from various countries, and all of them for murders.

Not that Detective Carter had been able to tell him that directly, since, you know, he had acted on his instincts and walked away before she came back with several uniformed officers.

No, John had stolen some cash from a would-be-thug, and gotten himself cleaned up – he didn't remember who he was, or why he wanted to die, and so, he didn't want to die anymore; what he wanted was to be himself again, now. Not looking anything like the bum who had been saved from a lethal dip from the Brooklyn Bridge. Way better than that.

Then he had gone to another precinct, lurked around for a few days, watching, guessing who was clean, who was dirty... And there he had found Lionel Fusco and his little friends. Or, you know, Fusco's now-dead dirty colleagues.

He had let Fusco live, because his heart wasn't in it, and it was obvious the detective more or less wanted out, but didn't know how to do that – or how to say no, for the matter. John could testify to that, considering he was now using the detective to keep an eye on Carter, to tell him what exactly she had on him... Which was more than John himself knew when he woke up in the hospital.

And yet not much.

“The thing, you see, with serial killers, and the standard psychopath too, now that I think about it, is that they let their emotions, their needs, their urges take over the moment they begin murdering people. They leave recognizable marks. Like, oh, that one was a nurse? Must be the Nightingale Killer. What, that one was beaten to death in a fit of rage? Let's look for fingerprints! And while it doesn't always work out right away for the police, they still end up finding them, because there's a moment they just can't control it. They let something slip.”

John didn't like serial killers. He wasn't sure why exactly – why he disliked them more than the usual killer, that is – but perhaps that was a hint... Or maybe he was just a normal person about it, for once. Difficult to say, when you don't remember a thing.

“Serial killers... Their need to do everything in order... Tss! Good way to say: hey, that one's mine. Killers for hire, on the other hand... Well, they don't exactly choose their targets, so the police can't find a connection there. That's always a plus, I guess. But at the same time, if they have to make it not look like the obvious hit it is, but more like something personal or accidental, because it's their technique to stay discreet, or because the client asked for it... They tend to revert to that same exact pattern. Some will go for the throat, some will prefer a certain poison. In the end, they do have a pattern too.”

So, what would it be, this time? Would he choke her, or would an injection be better?

“Me, on the other hand, I am comfortable with about any method of killing. For example, I cut open your bodyguard's throat, but I will shoot you in the stomach in less than two minutes. I don't particularly care, you see. And that way, it's more difficult to link the murders to only one person.”

Better keep it simple, this time. Miss January would take some time to die, and John would be able to watch her suffer. Hoping that his real personality – not the ersatz he was going by right now – would finally come out and tell him to stop it. Even if it was just by cutting short the woman's suffering.

The real John hadn't come out to play once in seven months, though. But he wasn't losing hope. He needed it to work. Because if it didn't...

John might not remember why he had wanted to die, but it didn't mean he had a reason to live now.

He took the gun on the table, aimed it at Miss January – he'd have to look her up, at least to see what her name was. He didn't shoot right away. Considering.

A smirk.

The woman's fear grew in her eyes. So much, that it was comical. This kind of things didn't really make him laugh, in fact, not when it was because of a real threat. Scaring someone like Fusco, by implying things he wasn't actually going to do, except if the short man forced him to – well, that was fun. Taunting an actual victim wasn't particularly pleasant.

But John was all for doing whatever made him feel bad, if it might get a reaction out of him.

“Then again, it doesn't really matter if there isn't a body to examine, does it?”

There was a reason why he had so much lye in the backroom, after all.

The woman tried to say something, to beg for her life, probably – but there was a reason for the gag too. Not that anything she could have said would have gotten him to reconsider, not after the offer.

John pulled the trigger.

 


End file.
